Story Of My Life Summary
The Story of My Life was written while Helen Keller, then in her early twenties, was
a student at Radcliffe College. It is a moving story of the education of a
child with the extreme handicap of being deaf and blind. The book begins with a
rather vague description of young Helen’s earliest memories, before she became
deaf and blind at the age of nineteen months, but most of it narrates her
teaching by Anne Sullivan of the Perkins Institute for the Blind.
The Story of My Life is far from the cry for help that it might easily have been. The
tone is one of joy. Keller emphasizes her early love of language. She recalls
learning to speak before she lost her ability to see or hear and her desperate
attempts to reawaken this ability. Throughout the book, there is a strong
emphasis on her love of language, especially the written word, which was, after
all, one of the few ways she had of relating to the outside world.
The major emphasis of A Story of My Life is on the work of Sullivan, whom Helen
always in this book refers to as Teacher. As subsequent writings made clearer,
Sullivan’s methods were far from orthodox at the time. She communicated with
Helen mostly by use of the manual alphabet, although lip-reading with fingers
was also attempted. At the time, oral communication was almost universally
stressed among educators of deaf children.
When this book was written, Keller had already published a few
articles and was doing well at Radcliffe (she was graduated with honors in
1904). Keller makes it clear that she cannot speak intelligibly, and stresses
that she probably never will. In fact, when Keller became a social activist
later in life, she made a number of attempts to improve her speech, although
her double disability made this difficult. After her graduation, she was
regularly accompanied by Sullivan on lecture tours. Sullivan acted as an
interpreter as well as an additional speaker on educational methods.
The Story of My Life is a tale of triumph over difficulties that would be
insurmountable to most children. Keller went on to become a noted author,
speaker, and political activist, advocating human rights for people not only
with physical disabilities but also with social problems. Many of her later
works were largely autobiographical, but there was always an emphasis on the
inherent power of the individual to journey through life with hope. The
Story of My Life is
the first chapter in such a journey.
